João Pedro Vale & Nuno Alexandre Ferreira

Love How the Road Begins is an unprecedented project produced especially for MAAT. The duo’s first major performance at a museum, the exhibition appropriates the title of a collage poem created by Cesariny in 1955 and articulates numerous graphic, cultural and artistic references that the artists sought from among the surrealist imagery and legacy and in particular references of the portuguese poet, but also to the first queer political and sexual liberation movements. These elements refer to ideas of impurity and cleansing, crime and punishment, and their historical correlations with homosexuality and notions of gender and cure. João Pedro and Nuno Alexandre juxtapose an amalgam of objects and images in the composition of a two-story installation; a structure that resembles a large surrealist collage or assemblage that evokes gay community cruising spaces – such as public urinals, sex clubs and saunas – but also brings to mind the sanitary infrastructure and equipment for spaces such as, for example, urinals, laundries or cells and other elements of prison life. These objects and environments are allusions to the perpetuation and reconfiguration of these forms of restriction of freedoms, rights and individual guarantees in contemporary society.

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